Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
And I have moved my mastodon account to an instance who actively defederated Threads. I’m not interested in interacting with anyone on that network.
And I’m fucking sick of the “content relevant for me” thing. I interact with people asking/giving help, discussing and so on. Mindlessly consuming “content” is simply a disease.
I don’t get why Mastodon servers feel the need to fully defederate from Threads. Silencing them is much better. It allows your users to follow Threads accounts without people who don’t know anyone on that side getting overwhelmed by the global timeline, as Threads is about twelve times bigger than the entire rest of the Fediverse combined.
Nobody is moving from Threads to Mastodon because mastodon.zip decided to defederate all you’re doing by blocking them is preventing the users with friends who use Threads from using your site correctly.
Of course some platforms, like Lemmy and Kbin, don’t support moderation features like silencing, it makes sense to fully defederate in those cases, but only because of technical restrictions, really.
How many reasons does Meta have to give before distrust is the default?
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
While Facebook’s recommendation algorithm definitely plays a part here, most of this analysis could have "Facebook " replaced by “the internet” without changing any of the meaning. The same hate speech is also spread across WhatsApp (which caused WhatsApp to put a limit on the amount of times you can forward a message) and every other messenger.
Facebook’s automatic hate speech removal system may be pitifully ineffective, at least they have one. Here on the Fediverse, we have a slur filter, just sometimes, and even fewer moderators per user than Facebook has.
And, despite Facebook’s role in helping spread hate speech as a large platform and refusing to proactively go after such speech, here’s how the rest of your conversation will go:
“Hey, admin, why can’t I follow my mom on threads from your instance?”
“Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar.”
“Aw, that’s bad. Anyway, I’ll just create a Threads account I guess, my mom is sharing my niece’s baby pictures.”
why wont threads friends go to mastodon
Same reason why Telegram friends won’t go to Signal: they don’t care about the platform they use, and you end up being that friend if you ask them to change their habits for you.
Once Threads support federation in both direction, the need to move disappears completely. Why would you move to a server run by volunteers that sometimes goes down when Elon says something stupid, especially if your Mastodon friends can interact with your account like normal. That’s ActivityPub working and doing what it’s supposed to do.
It’s great that everyone is able to choose for themselves
I think this will beneficial for the fediverse overall. Thereads will eventually have to advertise. At which point hopefully other Platforms on the fediverse will become more attractive to some threads users.
Absolutely not, federating with Threads is the first step in the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process that businesses have used in the past to kill things like the fediverse. This is a win for businesses that want to see the fediverse dead and buried
The wrong kind of users though… The people on Facebook likely to use Threads, are the ones who I’d hate to federate with. Discussions would quickly change to low effort karma grabs and inside jokes.
You’re also likely to get a lot more people doing stealth/viral marketing, more bots, etc
That’s why I use Beehaw honestly… It actually feels like I’m talking to people
i love how excited adam mosseri is about activitypub; it’s a win win for the protocol.
being able to follow the mainstream people on threads as well as the niche people on mastodon through a foss client like megalodon and the move from threads to another instance if i get sick of it will be fantastic and will help both mastodon and threads grow in the implosion of twitter.
Just like how Facebook Chat federating over XMPP (Jabber) was a win win for that protocol? https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/12/0158223/facebook-now-supports-jabberxmpp
Yes yes, encouraging EEE is totally a win-win…
A lot of clueless users will get on Threads and attract attention to it. Then governments, public institutions and other organizations will join it too due to the attention. Open fediverse users will protest against their choice of Threads, but will be pushed back, citing the federated nature of threads. Finally without any recourse, open fediverse users will start following these Threads accounts for important updates. And then fine morning, meta will announce that they’re cutting the federation due to ‘spam from the open fediverse’. And the open fediverse users will be left high and dry without updates from these important accounts. Many will resist it and stay on the fediverse. But a huge population without such strong moral stances, will abandon the fediverse and move to Threads to retain their access to the important updates. And the fediverse will become a shadow of its former self. The end!
The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.
- Count Zero - William Gibson
They just need the data. It’s available, all they need to do is open wide and scoop.
DEFEDERATE, PLEASE! Now Meta has the highest presence in the Fediverse, and they can do whatever they want to it.
Firstly, you can choose an instance that doesn’t federate with them. Everyone can choose for themselves. And second you didn’t read it probably, they’re testing it and there a handful of accounts that have activity pub enabled. That certainly doesn’t make them the biggest presence.
They’ll enable it for everyone soon. Meta will force the Fediverse its way, for $$$. Why else do you think they want to be in the Fediverse so badly?
Mark my words.
I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:
- it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
- some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
- it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
- it helps their image
I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over for them currently and since most people don’t care about the fediverse I don’t see it growing much either. Although I’d certainly like it if that were the case.
They can probably get the data already, it’s all openly available. Federating it’s basically all upside and no downside for them, but it’s not exactly the biggest priority to implement it, it‘s going to take some time.
I’m not saying it might not have a negative effect or that they care a lot for what’s currently there. They’ll certainly want to monetize threads sooner or later.
They don’t WANT to be in the fediverse, they HAVE to be. I can’t understand why people find this so hard to read.
Meta just launched Threads in Europe, citing “compliance concerns” as the reason for the delay. This happens at the same time they announce their first step towards ActivityPub. The brand new Digital Market Act requires big companies to open their dominant platform and Meta wanted to be on the front foot before launching, and then get ready to laugh as Twitter get into regulatory hot water. If you want to run in Europe and be a dominant platform, you HAVE to be open.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that connecting in any way to Facebook is not a good thing … is either very naive, or complicit to wanting to take down the fediverse.
Facebook already has enough content and enough of a platform on their own – they literally control half of the worldwide social media network. Why do they want to spread into this new space?
The only reason they want to be on this side is to conquer or destroy.
Tell that to @Gargron@mastodon.social (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@Gargron@mastodon.social/111576826633308486
Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.
I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.
Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?
“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.
Are you truly incapable of acknowledging that large bags of money motivate people to do unpopular things sometimes?
I really don’t care about Mastadon as I haven’t used it much, but I couldn’t really think of a good reason for federating with Meta.
Well a good reason could be that it brings federation to the masses. You know, like everyone who uses federated networks wants it to be. This isn’t some exclusive club and wider adoption is a good thing.
If only to prove that it can work.
This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.
Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.
To me it’s like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go “don’t tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you”.
There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)
It’s 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that’s why they are coming for it.
Can you explain how it’s 100% super obvious? I thought a popular platform with many users entering the fediverse might be good for exposure but it seems like the consensus here is that it’s actually bad. Help me understand how it’s bad?
I see you conveniently left out the bit where they said people could also just be naive. Kind of funny how you attempted to take the moral high ground and lecture this person like they were a small child, yet you yourself cherrypicked in bad faith just to have some little takedown moment. One of you certainly came off more childish and immature in this exchange and it wasn’t the other guy.
Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.
In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?
How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.
Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.
It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.
If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.
TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.
This was the first comment on this post that made me feel like I wasn’t taking crazy pills. I agree completely. I still don’t see how Threads joining ActivityPub is a bad thing for us, unless it convinces a large number of people to migrate to Threads from their current instance.
The funny part is that blocking the instance makes it more likely that people migrate to threads. We’ve seen that when lemmy instances defederate from the larger problem servers, people will jump ship to be back in those larger communities.
Sick, I get tons of more interesting content while being with a Mastodon instance I trust, a nice FOSS client to explore the content, and keep my privacy! If this actually bothered me, I could simply click the three dots and block the instance, so surely that shouldn’t be a big deal, right?
I can follow him on kbin.
https://kbin.social/u/@mosseri@threads.net/posts
Interoperability was the purpose of activitypub. I’m not oppossed to Meta , Tumblr and wordpress joining the fediverse.
As long as I can use an open source community platform.Let’s hope this isn’t the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
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100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general “fuck meta” attitude.
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Of course cooperate social media isn’t the only harmful social media, if anything it might be the most civil one for its scale, simply because they’re trying to sell ads next to the content so the content can’t be complete garbage. They also have a bunch of other incentives that ultimately make it a shit experience for everyone, but there is an incentive to moderate.
Something to remember is that it isn’t the company producing the harmful content. It’s people.
It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it’s become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.
It’ll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won’t be worth the trouble.
That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
Cannot confirm. I have my own email server setup since years, with dkim, spf, and dmarc all functioning correctly. I score 10/10 on mail tester. My server has never sent spam (I get daily reports of all emails delivered, so I can actually back this statement up), and my emails go directly to spam 100% of the time on all the major platforms.
I send so little email they won’t even tell me why I’m going to spam.
For personal email it’s not such a big deal, I just tell them to check their spam; but for trying to reach customer service in a large corpo for example, it is impossible.
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
I think the cat’s out of the bag. There’s no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I’m not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it’s an answer to the wrong question. We’re asking “how can we make social media better?” and not “why do we need social media at all?”
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don’t control and can’t enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still “how can I get all my ‘content’ in one place?” because we’ve been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I’d rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
Mark Zuckerturds destroys everything he touches, and now he wants to touch you.
Elon Musk: “Hold my beer”
The difference is twitter is just another big social media platform. Elon Musk isn’t potentially trying to ruin an open source federated alternative that fixes a lot of the problems with social media. He’s just messing around with and tanking a big corpo social media site.
So I honesty don’t really care about twitter as it will get us more users if he burns it down, if the Zuck doesn’t ruin us first.
Basically twitter isn’t a threat to us and could actually be a big help.
Threads could ruin everything we’ve worked for.
If this is the level of maturity that’s going to represent the Fediverse, I’m almost inclined to believe they actually do have pure intentions, because there’s no way this shit is financially valuable.
There’s a large number of people here that have a deeply emotional hatred for anything related to Meta and I get that. But these dull comments don’t make for a fun discussion. They don’t add anything. They won’t affect anything. They’re just boring comments wasting everyone’s time.
